Leslie Marmon Silko's Sacred Water

Laura Coltelli
[published in Italian in the Italian journal RSA 4 (1993): 57-65]
In classical Western culture, sacred waters evoke visions of headwaters and lakes, rivers, and
springs endowed with powers of purification or magic-casting spells, inhabited by nymphs and deities
whose identities or destinies merge with the waters that embody them.
For Leslie Marmon Silko, a Laguna Pueblo Indian rooted in parched mesas who has lived her life
in communion with nature, the water that forms the subject of her most recent and highly distinctive
collection of short prose compositions, Sacred Water, is almost insubstantial as a physical element.
Sacred Water deals with the presentiment or memory of water, water as a precious rarity, water as an
integral part of the spiritual life of the Pueblos, above all those to the west of the Rio Grande. In this
area of New Mexico they depend almost exclusively on rain for all forms of survival; for instance, in
the old stories, a scarcity of water is often interpreted as a sign of disharmony or as a punishment by
their creator, Spider Woman, for some act of disobedience. This lack of water may lead to an
alienation from the land and from the benevolent spirits that inhabit and govern the precious flow of
water.
Silko's Sacred Water, which can be likened to a small anthology, is composed of 41 brief tales
accompanied by 39 black and white photographs which, at times, run parallel to the text and, at other
times, extend the horizons of the stories. But the water stories are Silko's guiding thread in this
celebration, weaving an almost ritualistic incantation into her stories. And as words in ritual derive
part of their meaning from the accompanying gestures, so in this slender publication the significance
of the written word is enhanced by the material aspects: the jacket, the paper, and the photos are all
handmade and homemade. {22} The book thus becomes a complex representation of the author's
thoughts and craft, entirely composed and produced by the author herself.
The very word that identifies water is sacred, and respect for the sacred word imposes
restrictions on its use. However, all sacred, primeval concepts use the language of simplicity, and
Silko has chosen not to exclude the seemingly trivial from these stories, or, as she herself puts it even
more simply in the subtitle of Sacred Water, these narrations. Narrations and images. Even the latter
are entirely unpretentious: simple polaroids suggesting, evoking the passage of water.
Affixed to Sacred Water's jacket of soft ivory paper, flecked with tiny grains like speckled sand
on a wall, are photocopies of a drawing by Silko (bearing the date and initialed by her own hand,
showing the title and the name of the author). The same drawing, in an enlarged photocopy, appears
on the inner face of the jacket and the following page. In the picture the prominent element is a parrot,
which in Pueblo mythology represents a rain bird, an invocation to rain and to the spirits of rain. It is
a "glyph," as Silko herself states, that "I invented to signify the phrase `sacred water.' The glyph
contains more information than the words `sacred water.'" 1 The same arrangement is repeated at the
collection's end; the only variation is that a photocopy of a drawing of a snake by Silko is glued to the
back jacket (also authenticated by her initials and the date in her own pen). The water motif, so
insistently repeated, thus provides a double visual frame for the central body of the narrations and the
photographs.
The narrations are contained in this web of paper and string: every aspect of nature, every
element that reveals itself to the eye and the ear is scanned in order to discover therein the forecast,
certainty, or memory of rain. Sudden gusts of wind, heavy clouds, the pearl blue of the sky, and the
smell of the land saturated with dampness, all these are carefully recorded. The sensory peceptions of
the reader are engaged in this search, straining as with an almost genetic sensitivity to recognize the
signs of the sacred water. Through this sacred aura the natural phenomenon opens into a universe of
profound spirituality.
The rhythms of childhood, from learning to prohibitions, are molded by the ever-present
availability/absence of water ("we were never permitted to frolic with or waste fresh water" [6]); these
learning processes include, for instance, the protection of animals that in other cultures are not
commonly associated with the affection children shower on pets, such as frogs and toads, described
here as "the beloved children of the rain clouds" (6). And it is water that is the driving force of Silko's
storytelling and imagery, from the story about toads with their rear ends pointing in the four cardinal
directions (12) to the {22} big pitcher placed on family members' graves lest they be thirsty. Indeed it
is here that water becomes life-bearing even in death for those who have not truly died but have

simply departed ("the people used to say that a person had passed on; they seldom used the word
`died'" [16]) and who will return as rainclouds. Bodily existence is transformed into the most precious
possession, water, and existence continues in this cyclical metamorphosis of the buried body that lived
on water and itself then becomes a shiwana, dispenser of water.
In this cyclic interaction between water absorbed as a life-giving force and water that returns,
even the desert landscape of the Southwest presents itself as a benevolent provider of water; water
collects and is held in rock formations acting as natural cisterns so that, as the older generations of
Pueblo Indians recall, even in periods of drought survival was assured.
All around Laguna and Acoma,
there are sandstone formations
which make natural basins and pools
which hold rainwater. These rainwater
pools are cherished even
now, because long ago, in times of
drought, the survival of the people
depended on the rainwater stored in
the sandstone pools. (18)
In Pueblo cosmogony, life on this earth represents the final act of creation: the emergence from
the four underground worlds where the makers of this creation have their abode, first and foremost
among them the "Creation Mother" (Silko, "Landscape" 113-14). The way into these worlds, Silko
tells us in Sacred Water, is through natural springs and lakes, which for this very reason are
worshipped as natural phenomena believed to possess great power. The serpent Ma'sh'ra'tru'ee, a
messenger from the Gods, dwells in these waters, ensuring that there is sufficient water for the wellbeing of humankind, animals and plants. Significantly, the draining of a lake near Laguna, Silko's
home village, and the resulting disappearance of the "Water Snake" closes what could be called the
first part of the story, marked so far by careful observation of nature but also imbued with a profound
religious and mythological aura. This context, which forms an intricate web of intercommunicating
physical and cultural worlds, is responsible for sudden and unexpected misunderstanding when, in the
second part, the rock drawings of a snake indicating the presence of water nearby are interpreted by
the first Spanish conquistadores as coded signals pointing towards hidden treasure. This constitutes
the first act of disharmony with the land, which has its sequel centuries later in vehicles swept {24}
away by thunderstorms (34-35) and children drowning in swimming pools in Tucson ("designed to be
attractive and inviting" [54]), deaths which, Silko points out, are far more numerous than those caused
by traffic accidents.
The detailed descriptions of the metamorphosis of the desert landscape wrought by sudden
summer rainstorms racing out of nowhere reveal close familiarity with these abrupt changes, and
these passages have the passionate, descriptive force that is characteristic of Silko's prose. But as
defiant resistance against the violence of the water and its legacy of death is charted, the rhythm of
"storytelling" loses fluidity and evocative power to take on the impersonal, almost statistical, tone of
journalistic reporting, of fatal cause/effect consequentiality.
As a wisely constructed foil to this sequence, the third or central part of Sacred Water focuses on
Pueblo communities and the Native communities of Alaska threatened by stormy floods. The
thoughtlessness of those who are unable to recognize the signs of light and wind is replaced by a
climate of anxious awaiting, followed by conscientious and painstaking work to set up defences and
small dams to save things and people. An elaborate network of ditches is set up to divert, and
therefore preserve, such great abundance of rain. The violence of nature is transformed into fertility,
the hostility of the desert into protection of the watchful shiwanas, the dispensers of water.
Just as there is interaction between the storyteller and the audience through voice and gestures,
Silko's pages (narrations, photos, fonts and typesetting, paper, and binding) also "form part of the field
of vision for the reading of the text,"2 thereby inviting those who approach the book to read carefully
and involving them in an intense dialogue with all these elements. The framing elements, for instance,
have a specific material quality that is defined both visually and by touch. A dialogue is set up not
only with the external world represented by the reader but also between photographs and the written
word, between the page and the colors white and black, and between approximate alignments and
jagged cut-offs. Storytelling is word performance, then, an evocation of images, but it is also the
representation a book makes of itself, the perception of its physical substance, its shaping of a page
simultaneously with the shaping of the story, of the writing, of the imagery. All of these elements

culminate in a synthesis that does not exclude modern writing and photography but allows these
features to be used in a process that will not freeze them. The words can change, and the images
ultimately leave a sense of profound and constant inconstancy, dominated as they are by clouds or
water, by animals and flowers that are subject to metamorphosis.
The very presence of such inherently fragile matter as glue, string, and thin, porous cardboard is
far removed from the customary solidity {25} of a book as a finished commodity that is unmodifiable
and has the nature of a thing that has completed its cycle. And, indeed, the author does not parade her
work as concluded but rather intimately in progress; she also does not present herself as a writer in the
Western tradition by codifying the story into a fixed written output. The numerous and quite
substantial changes introduced into later versions of Sacred Water, as compared with earlier versions
sent as complimentary copies to friends, are by no means mere revisions but genuine enrichments.
Just like the storyteller in the oral tradition, Silko elaborates her narration with every version: "I like
the idea that like the oral narrative which changes subtly with each telling, my book Sacred Water also
changes as I tinker with the text and with the `glyph' and other visual dimensions of the book.
Because I am making my own books, I can amend the text and change the book's design to
experiment with different visual effects freely." 3 Following the same principles as those that govern
oral transmission, she thus produces her own performance, which materially gives rise to her own
book: "I make the books for the sheer sensual pleasure of the paper, glue and the picture. Hand-set
type and lovely bookbindings are wonderful, but they wouldn't be right for this book. I wanted a book
which is unmistakably my book, a book which only I could or would dare make. Sacred Water is this
book."4
The sense of performance is carried even further by the use of the term Flood Plain Press, which
is actually the name of a stretch of land owned by Silko herself. The conventional layout of the
frontispiece information is thereby maintained. Yet, in a subtle way, these apparently conventional
indications come to denote a different relation between the work and its author: a new perspective
unfolds, in which the author is involved in a global process encompassing the possibility of change,
change flowing from the currents of creative power that is not attributable exclusively to the
writer/storyteller, but is rather an intrinsic feature of the becoming of things.
A significant addition to Sacred Water is the dedication appearing beside the first photograph,
which was absent in the earliest version: "In memory of the nine Thailand Buddhists assassinated in
their temple near Phoenix, Arizona on August 10, 1991." This murder occurred only a few months
before the publication of Silko's latest novel, Almanac of the Dead,5 to which she had dedicated ten
years of intense work:
I was exhausted in every way, and I questioned the dark vision in Almanac. I decided I needed to reread Zen Buddhist writings, and to focus myself on the calm and timelessness and oneness which
surrounds us. I developed myself to this appreciation of Zen Buddhism for {26} about three months,
and just as I was beginning to feel as if the vicious world of Almanac was truly fictional, the nine
Thailand Buddhists were killed in their temple near Phoenix, Arizona. It was as if vicious destructive
forces which Almanac was about, sent me a message through those murders: `This is what we do with
Buddhists in southern Arizona.'"6
A further change, in addition to the tribute in memory of the murdered Buddhists and the
coincidence between Silko's Zen readings and the murder, came in the form of sudden awareness that
a story in Sacred Water concerning a multitude of toads torn and mangled by snarling dogs and
perhaps also decimated by radioactive contamination (64) presented a startling parallel to the
massacre of the Buddhists: "I realized there is a parallel image between the smashed dead toads in
Sacred Water, and the nine dead Buddhists. The non-violent and the defenceless smashed apart by the
aimless destroyers who themselves had been torn apart." 7 The interaction between stories of different
kinds, true stories or prohetic stories of destructive terror similar to those told in Almanac of the Dead,
is emphasized here once again in support of that intimate connection which in the Indian universe
unites one event to another. And indeed a connection is once again felt, even if "Sacred Water was
meant as a soothing, healing antidote to the relentless horror lose in this world. It was meant as a gift
to the readers who wrestled with Almanac of the Dead. Some of the readers were wrenched by
Almanac and I wanted to give them something generous, yet truthful." 8
As she weaves her story of sacred water, Silko touches on every aspect of humanity's journey on
earth, outlining its intense spiritual dimension and giving voice to mythological beings from a past
vitally united with the present. She traces a historical itinerary of values belonging to profoundly
different cultures, or rather the order of a long homogeneous story in opposition to the violent

disharmony of oppression, conquest, and imposition of alien cultural models.

Water is the vehicle that penetrates into these worlds and channels them into the story of the
rainwater pool in the Tucson Mountains where Silko now lives. Historical and mythic elements blend
with the personal in an affirmation of other indivisible interrelations. The story of this water purified
from the devastating invasion of red algae by means of water hyacinths indicates--as for Tayo in
Ceremony, Silko's first novel--the route towards a genuinely regenerative ceremony. In the water that
"began to clear and smell clean" (Waters 72) a design of harmonious growth begins to take shape,
similar to the configuration of stars that guides Tayo to the completion of his ceremony. Only at the
end, when the process of regeneration has run its full course and {27} the story has repelled the
intervention of the destroyers, can Tayo go back and collect the seeds of the plant indicated by Ts'eh,
his guiding spirit, and make them grow in many places, thereby imitating the way a story is spread by
oral transmission. Thus Silko's water plants, spurred by vibrant, purifying growth, become stories that
enrich the "storytelling" on Indian land. When, at some future date, other destroyers appear on the
scene and have to be defeated, as in the apocalyptic Almanac of the Dead, Silko's latest novel, there
will be other stories with which to fight them, such as that of the datura, the plant of powerful and
awe-inspiring sacrality venerated by Pueblo Indians, which succeeds in metabolizing waters
contaminated by radioactive wastes.
The slender vein that forms streaks of yellow uranium, as bright and vivid as pollen, in stones
gouged out of the bowels of the earth and arranged in a monstrous design of cosmic proportions by
the destroyers (Ceremony 246), is the image of an impending devastation portrayed in the final pages
of the novel, as well as near the end of Sacred Water. But the land is inviolable, Silko declares, and so
are the stories that defend us and endow us with our identity as a people:
the ancient people perceived the world and themselves within that world as part of an ancient
continuous story composed of innumerable bundles of other stories. ("Landscape" 111)
Thus the story of this water becomes a collective story, forming a bond with the innumerable
narrations that speak of Indian land, narrations that are always encompassed within a cyclical time
deriving its continuity and cohesion from interpretation of the landscape. But in order to understand
this Native interpretation, the very term "landscape," Silko argues, is found wanting:
the term landscape, as it has entered the English language, is misleading. "A portion of territory the
eye can comprehend in a single view" does not correctly describe the relationship between the human
being and his or her surroundings. This assumes the viewer is somehow outside and separate from the
territory he or she surveys. Viewers are as much a part of the landscape as the boulders they stand on.
There is no high mesa edge or mountain peak where one can stand and not immediately be part of all
that surrounds. ("Landscape" 108-09)
Equally distant from Indian sensibilities are the various descriptions that have been given of this
desert, from scientific classification concerning climate and vegetation to the spatial dimension, from
romantic celebration to an entity whose definition is achieved by {28} negation. But the only
negations that interpret this Indian concept are those of non-desolation, of non-arid vastness, of nonmetaphoric ambivalence of "Virgin Land." Nor is it a frontier landscape, where presence is more an
apparition than a customary state of affairs, for such a landscape existed "primarily as a text written
and read by Americans and would-be Americans. The West had to be not inhabited but invented"
(Heyne 3).
As the poet of Acoma Pueblo, Simon Ortiz, puts it in his description of Canyon de Chelly, "Lie
on your back on stone / the stone carved to fit / the shape of yourself" (67). There is truly a
compenetration of shapes and forms, forms that construct narration midway between orality and
writing, those that produce a book and those that generate life. This is where the Indian story of this
land springs from, like the clouds swollen with rain repeatedly photographed by Silko as they come to
rest on the horizon. Her desert gathers up and transmits a wealth of precious heritages: land of
memory and water of memory, water that is not only life-giving but is also the defining element of
life.